The Sinistra Zone by Adam Bodor

Author:Adam Bodor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2013-06-25T04:30:00+00:00

9

CONNIE ILLAFELD'S HAIR

One fine spring day, back when I worked as an assistant corpse watchman, I finally got to know Connie Illafeld — it wasn’t exactly the most delightful meeting I’d ever had, seeing as how, for all practical purposes, she no longer spoke any one single language. Instead she mixed them left and right, and the only people who could communicate with her somewhat had to know Ukrainian, Swabian German, Romanian, and Hungarian, and it didn’t hurt to know Carpathian German and Ruthenian dialects as well. Few such people lived in the Dobrin forest district, but one of them happened to be the chief bear warden, my friend Doc Oleinek.

Connie Illafeld was a sort of pen name. The progeny of the Illarions — landowning, serf-holding Bukovinian boyars — this woman, who lived among simple mountain folk on her family’s onetime estate, had originally been named Cornelia Illarion. Perhaps some other person around there might conceivably have been known as either Cornelia Illarion or Connie Illafeld, one person alone could lay claim to both these appellations.

So when I happened to notice one day the name Cornelia Illarion on a file folder emblazoned with the Red Cross — a folder destined for the clerk’s desk — and that this name was followed by her pen name in a flourish of red and in quotes. I knew it was her — practically a relative of mine, my adopted son’s onetime lover. I was dying of curiosity: I had to see for myself the being who, years earlier, had stoked the wild side of Béla Bundasian.

Back then I was working for the Dobrin mountain infantry as a civilian non-staff member; alongside various secret commissions small and large, I was the deputy to the district coroner or, as the locals put it, the assistant corpse watchman. The morgue stood in a musty old corner of the barracks, and when it rang of emptiness — which is to say, when there was no work — I assisted Colonel Titus Tomoioaga in the office. Since the district fully belonged to the mountain infantry, he was the one who kept records on everyone dispatched to Dobrin and who sent all the new arrivals to work. He was a slow, dreamy, mountain infantryman with the soul of an elk, however, who would stare listlessly out the window at the birds and at the gray clouds passing by over the spruces and firs. For him, reading even the most curtly worded records was a challenge.

On the day in question, the first warm breeze had just tumbled over the southern ranges’ icy ridges — a breeze packed with heavy scents. Flower petals and willow catkin pollen hovered above the streambed: word had it that among the Old Believers it was Easter. With spring two new internees came to Dobrin.

When, dizzy from the bright sunshine and the pollen, I stepped into the dimly lit office and there saw Cornelia Illarion’s name on a Red Cross file folder, I thought I was imagining things.

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